Gingerbread loaves

I have almost nothing to say about why or how I choose this recipe other than it looked like it would be flavoursome and that the cakes would not go stale quickly. This recipe is from the Good Housekeeping Cookery Compendium (1956 edition), section 3: Picture Cake Making, Children’s Cakes. A tempting illustration is provided by the book:

Notes

I was unsure as to what kind of brown sugar to use, so chose demerara. In retrospect, I think muscavado was intended, (hence the pale golden colour in my version), as opposed to the traditional darkness of the gingerbread. I’ll probably try this again in the future using muscavado to see the difference – I imagine they’d be softer as well as having a more treacle-y taste. (ETA: I think this would be an improvement on using demerara! I’ll probably try this and if you’re really lucky, remember to update this post.)

I halved the recipe.

I don’t own any mini loaf tins, so used a medium-sized bun tray instead and reduced the cooking time to 20 minutes.

I only iced one of the buns for the photo – using a teaspoon of icing sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice. This was definitely the right approach – lemon and ginger being best friends, on cakes and elsewhere.

Results

Voila! A batch of springy, tasty buns that stayed fresh for a week. (Well, I ate them all in a week, they may have stayed fresh longer.) These would fall into the category that one of my great-aunts calls ‘picnic cakes’, they have enough flavour not to need icing and they’re sturdy enough to be portable.